Enough food is produced in the world to feed everyone; so why are so many people hungry? Year 5 + 6 pupils worked together to find out just how unequally the world’s food is distributed.
Our work began with a series of challenges. First, we had to identify the continents of the world and try to decide which were the most densely populated. Most of us, used our knowledge of the world and considered the size of the continents to try to figure this out, but when we were presented with the actual population for each continent, we realised our estimates were not always accurate!
We then moved on to presenting the population for each country and its share of the world’s food using Lego figures, shreddies and a world map.
Each Lego figures is equivalent to 100,000,000 people and each of our Shreddies represents 2% of the World’s food.
We were shocked to discover that the continents with the highest populations actually had the smallest share of food.
For example: Asia’s population was represented by 36 Lego people and had to share just 3 shreddies representing just 6% of the World’s food. Just 5 Lego figures represent North America’s population who have as much as a 50% share of the World’s food! How can this be fair?
Our learning today made us realise just how unfair our food is distributed and how fortunate we are to have enough to eat and never experience hunger. Our discussions and our thinking contributed to writing some very powerful prayers to say thank you to God and to pray that the world’s leaders and governments will do more to bring about change so that everyone, regardless of where they live, has enough to eat.